Susanna Elm, Sidney H. Ehrman Chair and Distinguished Professor of European History
University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, January 30, 2025
4:30 PM
41 Haldeman (tentative)
Free and open to all

Lecture title: Forever Young: Gender and Christian Imperial Representation in the Early Theodosian Age

Abstract: Though Constantine made Christianity a legal Roman religion, the emperor who significantly enhanced Christian imperial rule was Theodosius I. (aka the Great). Theodosius, like Constantine and his precursors, was a most sacred and divine emperor (sacratissimus divinus imperator). As such he embodied and represented the apex of virtue, of everything Romans considered essential in a leader; that is, he was the apex of elite “manliness” or vir-ness. Theodosius’s transformation of Roman imperial rule into Roman Christian rule has received a great deal of scholarly attention. However, scholars have not asked whether (and if so, how) these changes affected notions of imperial vir-ness, and thus elite vir-ness, though both stand paradigmatic for ideas of Rome’s eternal imperium. The lecture uses Pacatus’s praise of Theodosius’s victory over Magnus Maximus as a case study to suggest that Theodosius and his sons used capacious and fluid forms of vir-ness to signal clemency and unity in ways that significantly expanded earlier iterations of these concepts based on Christian notions of “all the peoples.”

The Hardigg Family Fund was established in 1993 by James S. Hardigg '44 and supports the annual visit of a scholar designated as the Hardigg Family Fellow to Religion 85, which is the culminating experience of the Religion major, restricted to and required of all senior Religion majors.